Brad’s Story
“The biggest change since I have been coming to the youth centre is that I know now that I have people that I can talk to and that will help me.”
Brad has been attending open access youth work at the youth centre for at least 3 years. When Brad first attended he was a consistently angry young lad who would refuse to get involved in any activities. Over time we started to target Brad in our sessions and began setting ourselves targets to engage him in activities, in order to channel some of that anger that made it difficult to communicate with him. What then started to happen was Brad began to drop his guard whether that was through playing football or cooking etc, we started to see that instead of us searching out Brad in sessions he began to seek out our attention and slowly over time this had allowed him to open up and begin to ask youth workers questions such as ‘why am I always angry? why do I cry myself to sleep each night?’. Over this past year Brad has come to the realisation that although our open access youth work is about having a safe space for young people to engage and have fun, there is also the offer for young people to access support and this is exactly what Brad has started to do.